This is a workshop hack video currently gaining steam on YouTube (about 1.7 million views and counting). It's from the SeeJaneDrill channel, where host Leah demonstrates the "ticking stick" method of duplicating an irregular shape:

Leah's method of using the stick is simple enough, and perfect for duplicating a shape that has straight lines. But a couple of years ago I learned that this stick, with a different method, could also be used to precisely copy an irregular, organic shape. Christopher Schwarz--who now writes "The Anarchist Designer" column for us--demonstrating this method over at Popular Woodworking.

Image credit: Popular Woodworking

Click here to see how he got that seat to fit perfectly inside that hollowed out trunk.

Due to a few highly-publicized incidents, there are people who are convinced that electric cars, due to those pesky lithium-ion batteries pose a greater fire risk than gasoline-powered ones. For the record, the NHTSA concluded in this 2017 report (PDF) that electric car fire risks "are anticipated to be somewhat comparable to or perhaps slightly less than those for gasoline or diesel vehicular fuels."

Nevertheless, Germany road safety organization DEKRA, which conducts their own testing, submitted two tiny electric cars to some particularly brutal crash tests. "The speeds were far beyond those that are common in standard crash tests," the company writes. An example:

That's a Nissan Leaf hitting a pole sideways at 75 KPH (about 47 MPH). It's pretty obvious that the driver in that situation would not survive--" But that applies to every type of car, regardless of the type of [engine]," the researchers write.

So why conduct the test?

"The damage patterns from the crash tests are comparable to those on conventionally powered vehicles," says DEKRA accident researcher Markus Egelhaaf. "The high-voltage system of the electric vehicles was shut down reliably during the crash. And despite massive deformation of the drive battery, there was no fire."

DEKRA's ultimate conclusion: "Our experiments confirm that there is no reason to be less confident in the electric vehicle than in the conventional car."

The other car tested was a similarly diminutive Renault Zoe.

I’d like to install a pet door, so that my two dogs could get outside into the dog run by themselves. But after I spotted a rather large snake trying to get inside the house, I changed my mind.

If you’re snake-free, have need of a pet door and don’t like the traditional flap design, a company called My Kitty Korner sells a nifty patented hinge that lets you do this to your door:

I admit it's a bit ugly, and too small for my dogs besides; but if a compatible size were made with an anti-snake feature, I'd think about picking one up.

Last week Core77 correspondent John P. Kazior brought you news of the Unocup, a takeout coffee cup that requires no plastic lid.

This week its designers, Tom Chan and Kaanur Papo, have launched a Kickstarter to make the Unocup a reality:

If you think about the millions of plastic coffee cup lids we go through as a society, you'll realize how impactful this design could be.

At press time they were at $9,658 in pledges towards a $14,500 goal. There's still 28 days left to pledge, and I'm confident they'll make it over the finish line. If you want to pitch in, it's right here.

Product Ventures, a renowned design consultancy, specializing in product and packaging innovation, is looking for an exceptional Industrial Designer candidate with 3-5 years of experience. This person should be passionate about structural design and have a good understanding of how to translate visual cues successfully into three-dimensional forms. This position requires an aptitude to learn new skills and continually explore new methods to be a more effective designer.

When you go from the first napkin sketch straight into production.

"They said if we converted the CAD file from IGES to DXF we were going to lose some data. I told them we didn't mind."

"Someone borrowed my French curves and never gave them back. I can't draw freehand, so all I had to design this car with was a ruler."

"Originally it looked much different, but we accidentally dropped the clay model on the floor right before we scanned it, and thought it actually looked kind of cool."

"I designed this car because I'm that guy who always leaves my coffee cup on the roof while getting in, then drives off. The angle of the roofline will ensure I can't do that."

"We had to compromise and lose some of the elements from the renderings. For instance, the original wheels were supposed to be square."

True story: The rear cover retracts like a motorized blind; it turns a corner at the roofline and travels down along the rear window before rolling up into the front of the truck bed. So I guess if it rains before you retract it, this will be the first pickup truck that harvests its own drinking water for the passengers.

"We opted for a telescoping ramp because we don't imagine that anyone who actually buys this truck would ever step on it while wearing muddy boots."

"This truck HAD to be made with an impact-resistant ultra-hard 30x cold-rolled stainless steel. Because we made the sidewalls so tall and angled, our testing showed that every time someone tried to throw something into the bed from the sides, as is common, they missed and hit the metal instead."

"You'll notice the driver- and front-seat-passenger-seats are different; only the driver has a height-adjustable headrest. We didn't want to spend the money on doing that for the passenger seat, because chances are you won't be carrying any, since your friends won't want to be seen in this car."

I'm a native New Yorker and former die-hard urbanite. But now I've given the city up for good, and have permanently relocated to a rural farm in the American South. This "Free Range Design Observations" section will detail the design-related observations made as a result of this radical location change.

____________________________________

Because our farm is far from other people and stuff in general, I rarely meet neighbors or interact with other members of this community. But this morning I had to drive into civilization for physical therapy (bum rotator cuff and lower back woes, woo-hoo) and the exercise room was filled with chatty patients.

Today's hot topic of discussion: Potential snow on the local forecast, and lamentations of how the local supermarket will be shy of milk, bread and meat as a result. Apparently it snows so little down here that people go overboard on stocking up at even the mention of snow.

This made me recall Scandinavia, which is just about the opposite in terms of snow panic. They are highly adapted. The last time I was in Helsinki there was a heavy snowstorm, and I was interested to see that city workers there use gravel, not chemical salt, to scatter on the sidewalks for traction. Also, they don't bother shoveling (or at least they didn't during this particular storm). As it was a Friday night, I saw women dressed to the nines to go clubbing--and they navigated the unshoveled, gravel-strewn snow in high heels.

Later in the trip I visited the Arctic Circle, and as we were scheduled to fly out, the airport was hit with a snowstorm. I figured the flight would be canceled for sure. Nope; they squirted some blue liquid all over the plane, I watched it wash down the window next to my seat. Then we just took off, right in the middle of a rip-roaring storm. Zero problems.

Lastly I'll recount something I didn't see there in person, but read about earlier this year: Kids in Finland who commute to school by bicycle, even in the dead of winter.

That was Tweeted by Pekka Tahkola, an "urban well-being engineer" and the City of Oulu's Cycling Coordinator. As Mother Nature Network reported,

Although it may be hard for many parents in the U.S. to imagine letting a kid bike to school in any weather, it's the norm in parts of Finland, Tahkola says. "It's normal; always been like that. I cycled and kicksledded to school when I was a kid, too," he says. "And it's the same thing even in minus 30 C." (That's minus 22 Fahrenheit, in case you're wondering.)

Pekka Tahkola

Image by Pekka Tahkola

Image by Pekka Tahkola

Image by Pekka Tahkola

I know what you're thinking: These kids must have some super-tricked-out Finnish winter bikes, yeah? Actually, no:

Bicycling is easy in the area, even in winter, says Tahkola…. It has to be — in Oulu they typically have snow from November through April. The bike and walking paths are so well maintained that riders don't need special tires or gear to navigate them.

Image by Pekka Tahkola

"You can usually just use your single-speed upright granny bike with summer tires all year long, even on snow," he says. "We have great infrastructure and winter maintenance, that make cycling fast, easy and comfortable even in winter conditions. The distances are often shorter than with a car."

Image by Pekka Tahkola

In contrast, the biggest weather change I've had to deal with after my move down South is brutally hot, humid summers. It's especially bad on a farm, as there's outdoor labor to be done. It makes me wilt. I watched my 72-year-old neighbor, an ex-coal-miner, dig post holes for ten 4x4s in 100-degree heat that I just couldn't cut.

However, I've got no problem doing outdoor labor when it's freezing out. If the work is hard, you're only cold for the first few minutes. So I hope it does snow tomorrow.

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has figured out a clever way to attract patrons--specifically, Edward Hopper fans. They've taken the realist painter's Western Motel…

…and mocked up an actual, physical room in the museum to match it:

Here's the thing: You can actually spend the night in this room, as if it were a real motel. Launched in conjunction with their "Edward Hopper and the American Hotel" exhibition, which opened last month, the museum started offering the "Hopper Hotel Experience." For $150 to $500, depending on whether you want a private tour, dinner, after-hours access to galleries or other extras, you can lay your head inside this physical representation of the painting.

The 'gram above is by writer Margot Boyer-Dry, who wrote about the experience of spending the night there for The New York Times.

The Instagram post below features five shots that show you the behind-the-scenes:

The "Hopper Hotel Experience" has proven immensely popular--it's currently sold out.

If this trend continues, I wouldn't mind having a cup of coffee in a Nighthawks mock-up.

This is tricky to explain: Imagine that one of the pixels on your monitor could jump right off of the screen, and float in front of your face. Just one pixel wouldn't be much use for conveying information. But imagine if that pixel could then zig and zag through the air, fast enough that it could draw letters or images you can read.

That's essentially what researchers at the UK's University of Sussex have managed to accomplish. Their "pixel" is actually a 2mm bead of polystyrene that they are able to float, and precisely manipulate through 3D space, with the use of ultrasound. It can then "draw," and it moves so fast that it does not flicker, as it does when it appears on camera:

The research paper is called "A volumetric display for visual, tactile and audio presentation using acoustic trapping" and is freely available.

President Trump famously said "Trade wars are good, and easy to win." If a full-out trade war did break out between the U.S. and China, how would Americans fare? 1) What products would we pay more for as consumers, and 2) How might our specific job prospects suffer, i.e. what industries that you might be connected to would most be impacted?

To answer that question, it would help to know what things we most buy from China, and what things they most buy from us. Thankfully that data has been crunched by trade data organization The Observatory of Economic Complexity, and the numbers visualized by How Much, a cost information website that put together this "Most Traded Goods Between U.S. & China" chart:

See it bigger below.

Here I'll cut the image in two, in case you're on a non-zoomable monitor and cannot read the original image:

From China it seems we're buying gadgets, toys, games, computers and…seats, i.e. chairs and sofas. If that doesn't paint a bleak picture of Americans, I don't know what does; it's like we just sit on our asses and fiddle with gadgets and diversions.

As for what China is getting from us: I knew about the cars and planes, but had no idea we were sending so many raw materials to China. I guess somebody has to give them the resources with which to beat us.

All jokes aside, the Tesla Cybertruck has racked up roughly 187,000 orders since its launch last week. (Truth be told, my wife and I are discussing whether we'll add ourselves to the order list, but I'll get into that in another entry.) And now a design detail that we'd have preferred to hear during the launch presentation has come to light. From Musk himself:

That freaking explains a lot, and I wish Musk had stated that up front! It may not matter to consumers, but I have to think the average designer will evaluate an object differently when they learn that its aesthetics are partially a result of its manufacturing process. As initially presented, the all-flat-planes Cybertruck appeared to be the product of whimsy and/or a desire to shock.

However, Musk's explanation does not mean that I think the designers got the Cybertruck right. It doesn't look finished to me. A talented designer can do a lot with straight lines, and I think that having the roof come to a pointy peak is an aesthetic mistake, although I realize that's subjective. To have the rear roofline simply be an angled straight line from that peak to the top of the tailgate doesn't look daring to me, it looks lazy.

And anti-functional. Earlier versions of the Honda Ridgeline and the now-defunct Chevy Avalanche featured really dumb obstructions on the sides of the bed, which prevented users from loading or unloading things from the side. To a non-truck-user, that may not sound like a big deal. But it's a huge deal, if you're using the truck for actual work. And that's independent of the setting.

Earlier-generation Honda Ridgeline

Discontinued Chevy Avalanche

In an urban environment, tight parallel parking spaces mean you may only be able to access the bed from the sidewalk. In a more natural environment like our farm, the location of sheds relative to trees, natural features or angle changes in terrain, again means that you cannot always neatly back up to wherever you're attempting to load and unload from. Being able to climb up into the bed and easily hand or toss things over the side reduces labor.

I'd be shocked if I learned that Tesla conducted in-person interviews with real truck owners, like we see General Motors doing, and if those truck owners all clamored to have obstructive, angled sidewalls. Which tells me one of two things may be true:

1) The Cybertruck is not designed for existing truck owners who use their trucks for actual work. Or,

2) The designers don't give a damn if their aesthetic preferences reduce functionality and increase hassle.

I can at least forgive the first one, at least in America, where people like big things and feel that buying particular objects, independent of function, makes them special. I hate that instinct, but that instinct is what is currently driving our economy. The baseline comfort of our American existences, relative to parts of the world that live with real daily suffering, is based on our economy and this shitty ideal that we all have to treat with.

The second thing I find less forgivable. Designers are supposed to know better, and to be aware of the power of multiplication. A designer who spends dozens or hundreds of hours on a minor detail that, say, makes a tool easier to use, has created thousands or millions of hours of time for the people who buy that tool.

Designers are capable of creating wealth--not just of money, but of time and joy. Every detail you sweat can create thousands of hours of satisfaction and smiles, or frowns of frustration at mindless tasks that have to be repeated to compensate for poor design.

Tesla's a new company yet, so perhaps I'm demanding too much of the upstart. I'm already in awe of what the disruptive Musk has been able to accomplish in such a short time, so perhaps it's unreasonable for me to hope that designing in a bubble would yield 100% positive results.

And yes, you're probably wondering why my wife and I are considering ordering a Cybertruck. I'll have to get into that in a separate entry, and we'll see if my logic makes any sense or not.

Hatch is a Student Winner in the Service Design category in the 2019 Core77 Design Awards.

Climate change is one of the greatest threats to human security and mobility. The UN Refugee Agency estimates that by 2050, up to 250 million people will be displaced by climate change impacts such as rising sea levels, floods, famine, drought, hurricanes, and desertification.

When a team from the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design was asked how and what they would do to support climate refugees who came to their city, they envisioned Hatch.

Hatch is a personalized, government-sponsored service that helps new refugees feel well-connected and optimistic about their future in Denmark. It hand-delivers a customized "welcome" kit of tangible objects that may help displaced people and families feel more comfortable in their new city, such as a metro card, or Legos for families with children. Hatch also connects refugees directly to a select network of service organizations, congregating information for them instead of them having to wade through an overwhelming amount of resource options without being sure which ones cater to their specific needs, or even how to get in touch with them.

The design process was extremely research-heavy, with the five-person team – made up of Raphael Katz, Abhishek Kumar, Rina Shumylo, Juliana Lewis, and Sareena Avadhany – exploring the complexities of climate refugee migration, government and city systems, and the operations and offerings of service organizations. The designers relied on first-hand stories to help develop the kits and Hatch's accompanying app. For example, they learned that the general lack of emotional support throughout the migration process is just as challenging as the difficulty of navigating a new city's aid options. This allowed them, in their design, to prioritize the personal as much as the administrative.

The two Hatch touch-points — the app and the welcome kit — have been specially created for Denmark, but the design is ultimately scalable. It feels timely that other cities follow suit in exploring models of better relating to the refugees they're hosting, and Hatch offers a design pathway to do so. Reducing friction for these people and families in new cities or spaces may be one of the most important ways we support the world in its planet's current state of environmental precarity.

Learn more about Hatch on our Core77 Design Awards Site of 2019 Honorees.

I feel like a dope--all these years of looking at the White House, and I never realized: The Oval Office isn't even in the main building (a/k/a The Residence). I always assumed that the Oval Office's shape corresponded with the curved facade of the South Portico:

But while there are indeed oval-shaped rooms behind that curved façade...

...none of those rooms are the Oval Office. That latter room is off in a separate-but-connected structure, the West Wing, which I'd probably know if I ever bothered to watch the show.

In any case, 3D renderer Jared Owen has put together this cool video with exploded views of the White House, showing you how all of the spaces of the three-building-compound are utilized:

See Also:

Photos of the White House Being Gut-Renovated in 1948

What Type of Desk Does the President of the United States Use?

A Look Inside President Trump's "White House North"

The Story of Mar-a-Lago, the "Winter White House"

It's that time of the year again! The 2019 Core77 Ultimate Gift Guide competition has arrived.

What's on your design wish list?

For those who are experienced Core77 Ultimate Gift guide-ers, the rules are the same. Pick your top 5 gift ideas, all under an umbrella theme (something like Gifts for TikTok Teens, Star Wars Junkies, or Outdoor Dads) between now and December 16th, submit them to our Core77 Ultimate Gift Guide Competition and you'll be in the running for some amazing prizes provided by Sonos.

For those new to our competition, here's how it works:

1. Create a gift guide with a clever theme (if you don't have a Core77 account already, you must create one first here). You're allowed to create as many gift guides as you want. 2. Get your friends to vote for you! 3. On December 17th, one community choice winner and one winner selected by our editors will be announced on our homepage!

Read all of the official 2019 gift guide competition rules here

THE TOP DOGS!

One Editor's Pick—one gift guide chosen by Core77 editors—will receive a Sonos One SL, and one Community Choice Winner (the guide with the most votes) will be taking home a Sonos Move. Winners will be announced on December 17th.

COMMUNITY CHOICE

Get your friends and fans to back you up in the community choice gift guide competition. All you have to do is create a gift guide, share it on social media and get as many people to vote for your guide as you can! The gift guide with the most votes by December 16th will be crowned the community choice winner.

We're excited to announce the grand prize for the Community Choice winner this year is a brand new Sonos Move, a portable speaker released by Sonos this summer.

The ultra-durable, weather-proof, and battery powered Sonos Move speaker can be used both indoors and outdoors. It offers up deep sound as well as Trueplay tuning that balances sound according to where you are.

With the Sonos Move, Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa are built right in so you can play music and more via voice commands on Wifi. The battery life lasts for over 10 hours of playtime, and can be easily recharged using the included power base.

EDITOR'S PICK

This year's Editor's Pick, one gift guide chosen by the Core77 editorial team, will be taking home a classic Sonos One SL, Sonos's signature Wifi-connected speaker system.

Don't miss the opportunity to gift yourself some amazing Sonos gear this year! Get your gift guide started right now.

Ready, Set, Go!

If there's a topic we've covered a lot on this blog, it's bike storage:

- 9 Ways to Store a Bike Indoors

- Designing for Bikes Stored on Walls

- Small Space Challenge: Storing Bicycles Indoors

- Removable Handlebars for Easier Bike Storage

- The Parkis Automatic Vertical Bicycle Rack

- Compact, Overhead Bike Storage

However, most of those designs are focused on storing bikes indoors. Entrepreneur and outdoorsman Eric Pearson reckons that cyclists would prefer to reclaim the indoor space taken up by their rides, and his company, Alpen, aims to enable that with their freestanding Bike Capsule storage structure:

The rotomolded, lockable, rustproof and UV-resistant Bike Capsules can be bolted to the ground to make them theftproof, though details of installation are hazy.

Here's what it looks like in use:

It seems a little odd outside of an urban or suburban residence, though it certainly looks weathertight:

The idea of integrating these into parking structures sounds good on paper, but none of the renderings below show the Capsules with any parked cars around them, which would certainly complicate removal and insertion:

I'm not in the target market, as I haven't touched a bicycle since moving out of Manhattan last year, but I know many of you are. Would you plunk down $1,000 to own one of these, can you see it fitting within your current set-up?

Mike Butera is in an L.A. charter school classroom, showing teenage music students a small, spherical synth he's has been working on quietly for the last two years.

Until now, Butera has wanted to fly under the radar with this new product. Fans of his Artiphon Instrument 1—Time magazine and T-Pain among them—are zealous. And this latest release packs even more complicated tech—including spacecraft-inspired hardware—into what's set to be a more streamlined, simplified product. Butera wanted to be sure he'd gotten it right.

The students proved Orba, live on Kickstarter now, is simple, streamlined, easy to use—and they even demonstrated how it opens new, more creative ways of thinking about music-making.

"None of these kids were talking in genres," Butera recalls. "They are the first generation to grow up knowing they could make any sound on a laptop or phone, so they don't worry about whether they know how to play an instrument or not, and they don't think of music in terms of the outdated guardrails of mass-market genres." Instead of reaching for EDM presets, they liked the Orba's Tibetan singing bowl and harp sounds, and mixed them with drums for some surprising and undeniably meditative moods. They embodied Butera's philosophy that anyone can make music, that the process of making it is emotionally enriching, and that more makers will only broaden creative culture, not water it down.

A sociology professor becomes an inventor

Butera may have also felt at home in that classroom because he was once a full-time professor. He has a background in sound studies and the cultural theory of technology, an interest that led him to start designing the Artiphon Instrument 1.

"The realization I had almost 10 years ago is that music-making had not been disrupted enough for most people to think they could do it," he says. "It was still something that required people to commit to taking lessons, commit to an instrument. That's the same way people used to think about photography, cooking, even exercise. Nike didn't invent running, but they made normal people say, 'I'm going to go out for a run this morning.'"

Butera wanted to do that for music. And the timing seemed right. GarageBand was becoming available on iPhones and iPads, and he realized that "the way to get music apps into people's daily lives was to make them immediate and fun and translatable into what we consider 'real' musical gestures and behaviors." The software needed some more engaging hardware.

He spent the next four years prototyping what would become Artiphon's Instrument 1, a product that looks like an abbreviated electric guitar but which users can also play as a violin, cello, keyboard, or drum pad. It suggested all kinds of musical traditions as it sloshed them into one very new, radically more accessible approach to making music.

The Artiphon Instrument 1 evokes more traditional instruments.

"The fundamental goal was democratizing and treating musical instruments like consumer electronics: mass-producing them, making them affordable, and making people look at them and say, 'I think I could play that,'" Butera says. "I want to make beginners feel like pros and pros feel like beginners, for artists to have a new sense of wonder and beginners to immediately feel like they're making great music."

Instrument 1 was a breakthrough, but the ambition was even bigger

The Instrument 1 achieved Butera's goals in some respects—it was affordable and accessible, relative to most instruments. But at $399, and with so many references to traditional instruments baked into the design, it was still designed mainly for people who had at least some traditional musical experience.

"The string-like nature of it made it approachable—guitarists represent 60 percent of U.S. musicians," Butera says. "It could do keys and grid and pads and all these other things, but the physical suggestion of string features became a help for the guitarist and a hindrance for everyone else—and I would even argue [it was] a hindrance for some guitarists who couldn't see the new things they could do with it."

Butera went back to the manufacturers he'd worked with on Instrument 1—now with much more product design experience under his belt and an expanded team that included engineers from SpaceX and Blue Origin—and tried tackling the challenge from a new direction, asking how they might build everyday gestures into a more affordable, more plug-and-play experience.

Making musical instruments as accessible as Candy Crush

"We just kept thinking about what you could hold in your hand—not trying to translate old instruments, but thinking about directly making music. And as we thought about who this is really for, we talked about two things everyone is doing: They're on their phones all the time, and they're playing games. So we started to look at the ergonomics of those activities, and it became more and more obvious that we didn't need traditional gestures like, for example, strumming. That was based on the physics of strings; now, with fully digital instruments, we're free to explore new ways to play."

Their design 180 landed them at 360: a graspable half-sphere that notably diverged from the design of most historical instruments. "Small spheres are underrepresented in musical ergonomics because of the physics of how sound is acoustically produced. You used to need a long string to make resonance, or a large drum or resonant tube," Butera explains. "But small spheres feel really good to hold: a stress ball, baseball, teacup, or an orange."

The Orba is meant to evoke easy-to-grab objects like a tennis ball or an orange.

The handheld device makes melodies through taps and shakes, and players can preload patterns so it's easier to sound good riffing. "The idea is that you don't need to have a visionary musical intention all the time. Musicians know it's not like that; it's messing around and seeing what happens. We're starting to unlock that for people who could never imagine themselves making sound before," Butera says.

The synthesizer, looper, and MIDI controller has a built-in speaker, USB connection, LED lights, and Bluetooth—a technical feat made possible by the team's aerospace engineers. "On satellites and rocket ships you don't really get second chances," Butera says of the projects his engineers are used to working on. "Space and music tech have a big similarity: When you intend to do something, it has to work right every time." The meticulous engineering on the Orba builds the kind of trust in the instrument that helps users feel emboldened to take some creative risks.

Democratizing music democratizes our ability to express emotions

"This isn't about dumbing anything down," says Butera. "It's about designing technologies for the normal user, and showing [them] that not everything in music has to be so studio-centric. Just like all our other electronics, you're going to get this in 10 seconds."

Making these skills accessible opens up new types of expression. "Music is a very vulnerable thing," says Butera, "and yet it's a vehicle for people to express themselves in a way other people can understand and praise them for. It's not complaining to write a sad song; it's a work of art.

"I think the more tools we can give people to show their moods, their emotions, and their preferences, the more it turns the tables and invites people to be more than just consumers, to participate in the music you love. There are psychological benefits people get from creating even the simplest of sounds."

Orba is live on Kickstarter through January 20, 2020.

Did you miss out on the festivities at this years Core77 Conference, "The Third Wave"? Don't sweat it, as we are rolling out many of our presenters' presentations over the next few weeks.

In this video, Farmshelf CEO Suma Reddy discusses the urgent need for food systems to drastically change, and how her indoor hydroponic farm system has been designed to grow food at much faster rates using 90% less water than typical farming systems:

Watch more from the 2019 Core77 Conference:

What is Third Wave Design? | Allan Chochinov, Core77 Partner

John Maeda on the Merit of Taking Design Risks

How to Use Data to Design Better Products | Joe Meersman, Marijke Jorritsma and Dean Malmgren

So, this is a bit frustrating. For every person who manipulates an image of the Tesla Cybertruck with their desired design changes and posts their creation…

...there are more folks just Tweeting modded images of the truck without crediting who created them:

It's a pity, as some of the images look pretty cool and I'd love to know who did them:

In the shots above I recognize riffs on Blade Runner's spinner, Akira's bike, Halo's Warthog, Back to the Future's Delorean and The Dark Knight's Tumbler; the rest I can't place. I'd initially thought the vehicle with Japanese lettering was a patrol car from Pat Labor, but the kanji and hiragana don't match.

If any of you know what the other vehicles are callbacks to, or more importantly who created them, please do mention it in the comments!

In terms of design and construction, what's the most sophisticated object you possess and regularly use? If you're a motorist, it's undoubtedly a car. The average vehicle has about 30,000 parts (according to Toyota, the world's largest car manufacturer), if you count every nut and bolt. A bunch of those parts are made out of valuable materials that could be recycled--if they could be extracted from the damn thing.

However, the precision with which automotive factories assemble cars does not lead to precision disassembly. Industrial-strength adhesives, welding, one-way fasteners and more are the status quo, as if cars will live forever. As a result, this is the simultaneously insane, barbaric and impressive actions that have to be taken to dismantle a car in search of the good bits:

What you're looking at here is called the VRS (Vehicle Recycling System) Car Dismantler. It's powered by an HX180 excavator which is, ironically, manufactured by carmaker Hyundai.

I will say I'm impressed by the operator's precision and training. You can see him separating the good bits--"Here's the engine block, that's got some good metal in it, let's put it in this pile"--from the bad: "Here's the radiator, with some pesky fluids in it, let's throw this in the dumpster."

Lastly, here's a side view of a similar "processing" system:

This summer, while on a guided nature walk along the Hudson River in Manhattan, my companions and I were shown the seeds of the Kentucky Coffeetree. The seed packaging of the Kentucky Coffeetree is an incredible demonstration of evolution and design. The seed is encased in a package so strong, that to actually breakthrough the hard outer layers, one would require the teeth of a mastodon, or a bottle of Hydrochloric Acid. I was impressed with how specifically designed the tree's seeds had been so that they would be consumed and carried by the megafauna, now long extinct. All of this is to say that trees and plants, given their time, are pretty incredible packaging designers. To the plant, a seed is precious, and it has thus commanded the attention of millions of years of evolution and variation.

The biotech start-up Seed is putting a lot of time and energy into living up to the name. For its first product "for humans" the company has produced a "symbiotic" - a combination of prebiotics and probiotics for daily consumption. While the biotech brand is working to encompass an array of health and scientific endeavors, many of which are not yet easily deciphered, it has put an exemplary effort forward in developing the packaging for their first product. The product itself is serving the microbiomes of the human anatomy that play host to an array of helpful bacteria, but the company's symbiotic promises to be more than your typical health-supplement, and the branding is working hard to show that it is true. What is clear, is that the start-up's devotion to creating an ecologically-minded packaging is inspiring, and hopefully will help shift a packaging paradigm.

So far, Seed appears to be keen to show how it intends to do so. For the symbiotic, the company has open-sourced its packaging strategy. Upon ordering the symbiotic the customer will be sent a box made of FSC-certified paper, within which there is a glass bottle which has been insulated for shipping by a mycelium-based tray. The tray is a product of Ecovative Design's mycelium foundry. Customers also receive a monthly-refill of the symbiotic, which is delivered in a BPA-free, compostable pouch which was developed by Elevate Packaging. To insulate the monthly refills, Seed uses a cornstarch-based foam, so named, Corn Foam, from Green Cell Foam. The foam easily dissolves in water, it is compostable, it is even edible. The system itself has been thought out to reduce carbon output. For example, for international customers, the refills will come every three months, to reduce the amount of necessary shipping. "Part of that user-experience design is thinking about the sustainability of the human that we're ultimately serving on the other end. And then the Earth, that gets served on the real end of it. The end-user is not us. It's kind of our planet." says Ara Katz, co-founder and co-CEO of Seed.

While the end-user may be the planet, the start-up has chosen to aim to improve the ecology of the human body, and is unwavering in its application of science, design, and art to do so. This can be easily assessed in a visit to its website, which is filled with striking photography, and displays modernist sensibilities that many tech start-ups have come to love. Rarely does one find a health or biotech company putting so much effort into the presentation of the brand, and commit to such a unique aesthetic. While Seed professes a desire to help educate its users in the function of the symbiotic, as well as the other projects it has embarked upon, there remains an unenviable challenge. While I was intrigued by the aesthetic, I did feel intimidated by the information and felt a bit lost when it came to understanding what Seed was actually doing with its team of designers and scientists, as well as its formidable advisory staff of PhDs and Industrialists, featuring the likes of mammoth-resurrection, geneticist George Church, and Ivy Ross, VP of Design at Google (names that might otherwise give me pause).

To Seed's credit, they've put effort into making the science of what they do more accessible to non-scientists like me. "A big part of what we want to do at Seed, is to bring us humans and science culture together" says Katz. "Design can shape the way we understand things." Through social media, their website, their packaging and their product, Seed is trying to inform their users. While it will be fascinating to see how Seed continues to work to do so, their packaging strategy is a strong indication of their commitment to sustainability and finding more ecological solutions in wellness - the seed is ready to be planted, but what it grows remains to be seen.